Fall 2014 Graduate Seminars

Music 508 001: Musicianship, James Primosch(To be Announced)

The instructor will assess each student’s abilities at the beginning of the course and will structure the curriculum accordingly, covering skills in tonal repertoires as needed. Examples of the eventual goals for the course would ideally include the ability to:

This course affords graduate students an opportunity to work with a variety of hardware and software in creating electronic music. Students will be asked to complete a few short studies exploring various specific media, but the bulk of the course will be focussed on the students' creative work. Relevant historical and contemporary compositions will be analyzed and discussed.

This semester we will take a series of journeys together, each of which is aimed at developing our sense of the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. These journeys will be framed by matched sets of readings that illustrate not only the abiding issues that have confronted ethnomusicologists throughout the years, but also the changing terrain upon which solutions to those issues have been sought and articulated. We will be traveling along routes that variously explore travel writing, folklore, the comparative ethnomusicology of the Berlin School, early and ongoing anthropological connections, the beginnings of the Society for Ethnomusicology and some of its forerunners (like the International Folk Music Council [since 1981, called the International Council for Traditional Music]), and the definitional and methodological concerns that have animated and continue to (pre)occupy ethnomusicologists. Along the way, we will also have occasion to consider some of the theoretical and ideological shifts and concerns that our colleagues have confronted, negotiated, and defended over the years. Ultimately, these journeys will provide a framework within which to consider our own work—a contextual framework that will enable us better to understand the intellectual and political spaces within which we pursue ethnomusicology today. Finally, we will also invest a bit of time in reading together some very recent offerings by our colleagues with a view toward understanding how ethnomusicologists are currently (re)shaping and envisioning the field.

Music 650 301: Field Methods for Ethnomusicology, James SykesWednesday 330-630 p.m., Music Building Conference Room

The film Manakamana
ran recently at the IFC in New York to packed houses. Directed by two graduate
students at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, the film documents devotees traveling
on a cable car to Manakamana, a Hindu temple perched on a mountaintop in Nepal.
The film is rare for being a “commercial” (note the scare quotes) and critical
success, while emerging from within the university system. With this and a few
other such films, the Sensory Ethnography Lab is using new media to foster
intriguing connections between the academy, arts, and popular culture.

In this field methods course,
we focus first on traditional approaches to music ethnography – that is, we ask
what constitutes good and bad fieldwork, we question how fieldwork may be
ethically and usefully done, what issues of power, representation, and critical
listening to others it entails, which classic texts are needed to comprehend
its history and practice, and how various traditional media are useful for our
representations. In the second half of the course, we turn more fully to the
question of what role ethnomusicology can play in recent developments in new
media and the turn towards sensory ethnography. By this I mean, we will ask how
ethnomusicological engagements in the field may, too, straddle the divide
between the academy, arts, and popular culture, through experimentation that builds
on traditional field recordings while drawing on new media and approaches, from
YouTube to soundscape recordings, DIY venues, and companies like Data Garden, a
Philadelphia-based record label that makes recordings made of plants.
Throughout the semester, students will conduct fieldwork with a Philadelphian community
of their choice, moving through small-scale projects like interviews, field
recordings, photography, transcription, and film; these will culminate in a
final project that melds theory and practice.
The first two sessions will center on a lecture and discussion of
readings, after which the class will run as a workshop, centered on student
projects and revolving themes related to projects and readings.

Music 700 301: Seminar in Composition, Anna Weesner

Thursday 2 to 5 p.m., room 210 Music Building

This course will function largely as a workshop for original composition. Two ensembles will make multiple visits to the seminar, with the possibility of a combined visit: the Daedalus Quartet and Ensemble 39 (recent Curtis grads; oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and bass). These visits will afford opportunities for reading new work and lots of hands-on experimentation. In addition to composing, the work of the class will involve practice in critique and in coaching live musicians. Penn Contemporary Music concerts and the Penn Composers' Guild concert, as well as other performances, will be actively discussed.

The seminar will examine stagings of Baroque operas available on video. In particular we will discuss: 1. How today's directorial approaches impact the relationships between text and performance, and how, in turn, these relationships reflect a particular view of history; 2. The role of the singer as compared to that of the actor in theater, and the relationships between singer and character (both historically and today); 3. The permeable boundaries of opera as spectacle in its relationships with other genres (oratorio, for example) and art forms (dance and visdeo art, for example); 4. theorizations of theater/performance vs. those of opera. Other topics will include the role of the various agents of production that collaborate in opera production, the role of mediation that arises in today's videorecordings, and the current research directions concerning staging, acting, and performance practices during the Baroque period.

The interrelation of material affordances and technologies
and techniques—technics, in short—constitutes a central aspect of trans-species
existence. Sound, no less than other, more tangible matter, forms part of this technical
constitution, as does “music,” broadly conceived. The technical constitution of
societies is widely accepted, if debated, as seen in the dynamics of
determinism and non-determinism, the cultivation of bodily techniques, and
ideas and practices of accumulation, expenditure, inscription, labor, storage,
and transmission.

The June 5th, 2017 episode of WHYY'S ARTICULATE entitled "Goldberg Variations: Timeless Virtuosity" features Dr. Jeffrey Kallberg, Professor of Music and Associate Dean for Arts and Letters in the School of Arts and Sciences. Pianists Jeremy Denk and Simone Dinnerstein are also featured in the segment.

His release, The First Traveler, is a mixtape that features a live performance of the Matthew Clayton Trio! In addition to Matthew Clayton on alto saxophone, we have Justin Sekelewski on bass and Khary Shaheed on drums. The music also features the f